Organic milk has more beneficial fats than conventional milk, at least in the United Kingdom, says a new study. Whether these differences are nutritionally significant is less clear. Surveys of U.S. milk have yielded different results, though they also show differences between organic and conventional milk.

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"We had an inkling that organic milk was going to have higher levels of beneficial fats, the unsaturated fats," said Gillian Butler of Newcastle University.

The team had found such a difference in milk sampled on U.K. farms, but the new work, published in the Journal of Dairy Science,extended this finding to the milk that ends up on store shelves.

"What we found with the organic milk in the supermarket was that it was consistently higher, summer and winter," Butler said, "It showed even greater differences (than milk sampled on farms)."

By "beneficial" fats, the researchers mean the unsaturated fats, including omega-three fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, a type of fatty acid thought to have heart health benefits and anti-cancer properties and found almost exclusively in food coming from ruminants, like cows.